Caveman Circus
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(photo: @dcanies)
It’s 7am and you hear your iPhone start buzzing through your heavy slumber. It’s your alarm. You have to be at work in thirty minutes. You shut off your alarm, but you don’t set down your phone to get ready.
The first thing you do is open up your Instagram app. It’s a natural habit at this point to check your social media when you get up in the morning.
One of the biggest differences between me now and me 3 years ago is simple: I’ve taken responsibility for my life.
Now what I mean when I say taking responsibility, is accepting and taking ownership of my life.
I am responsible for my life, and everything that affects me is my responsibility to deal with.
Not the life other people wanted for me.
Or the life portrayed by popular movies, TV shows, and social media.
Or the life of my parents’ unfulfilled dreams.
Not the life my friends told me I should live, believing they knew all the answers, and telling me I should dedicate my finite time to the goals they were blindly pursuing.
Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally. Using an earlier example, if I see you on the street and I say, "Hey, you are so stupid," without knowing you, it’s not about you; it’s about me. If you take it personally, then perhaps you believe you are stupid. Maybe you think to yourself, "How does he know? Is he clairvoyant, or can everybody see how stupid I am?"
(photo: @ohutcherson)
If you’ve ever drank the Kool-Aid of one of those ” How to get ridiculously rich and passively become a millionaire in thirty days with no money down by working 4 hours per week from your kitchen table in your bathrobe” best sellers, or promotions you see every other person on facebook peddling these days…chances are you are in worse financial shape now then when you started.
I see people posting income claims from offers that would fall into this category on social media daily.
(photo: @medicadetion)
Understand that life isn’t supposed to be easy…and it would be boring if it were. There’s a quote painted on the wall of my gym “nothing worth achieving was ever achieved without effort.” I used to roll my eyes, but now I realize how incredibly accurate it is.
(photo: @wadeaustinellis)
I keep hearing about “adulting” and how hard it is. Well, it is hard and doesn’t get easier.
At almost 60, I still get scared, overwhelmed and don’t know what to do sometimes. I still have sleepless nights and wonder what the hell I’m going to do about some situations.
The difference is I can use my experience in prior situations to assess the current one. Or, even better, I have a circle of family/friends/professionals that I can go to for advice. Ones that I trust, not the one on the next barstool or such.
“Say goodnight to the sun, gents. It’s gonna be a long, wet, cold, nasty night.” Our instructors in SEAL training would tell us that as the sun went down.
They were right.
They told us that to make us quit.
But, if you stayed—if you didn’t quit—in the morning, you would see the sun come up again.
And that was the lesson the instructors were teaching.
But you had to learn it on your own. And you would always remember:
That there will be long, cold, wet, nasty nights.
But the sun will come up.
And everything will be okay.
That is life, too.
And it’s dark right now.
But hang in there.
The sun will come up…
– Jocko Willink
(photo: @kfred)
Think of an important goal you wish you could achieve.
Something that really intimidates you. Something that you haven’t begun working towards because it challenges your comfort zone.
That could be…
Getting a job (or a better job). Making more friends. Getting in shape. Writing a book. Or meeting more women – both in-person and online.
So why haven’t you taken any steps to reach that goal?
Whenever you undertake a new endeavor that makes you feel vulnerable, your mind runs wild trying to talk you out of it. Your self-doubt becomes deafening and all you can think about are the worst possible scenarios.
The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms –to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.